Brian Naylor

In this role, he covers politics and federal agencies, including transportation and homeland security.

With more than 30 years of experience at NPR, Naylor has served as National Desk correspondent, White House correspondent, congressional correspondent, foreign correspondent and newscaster during All Things Considered. He has filled in as host on many NPR programs, including Morning Edition, Weekend Edition and Talk of the Nation.

During his NPR career, Naylor has covered many of the major world events, including political conventions, the Olympics, the White House, Congress and the mid-Atlantic region. Naylor reported from Tokyo in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, from New Orleans following the BP oil spill, and from West Virginia after the deadly explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine.

While covering the U.S. Congress in the mid-1990s, Naylor's reporting contributed to NPR's 1996 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Journalism award for political reporting.

Before coming to NPR in 1982, Naylor worked at NPR Member Station WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, and at a commercial radio station in Maine.

Retired Gen. James Mattis' nomination to be President-elect Donald Trump's secretary of defense may, well, march through the Senate, but there is one potential obstacle to maneuver around: the retired general part.

The National Security Act of 1947, which established the current national defense structure, had a key stipulation, requiring that the secretary of defense be a civilian well removed from military service. In fact, the law is quite clear:

President-elect Donald Trump delivered a campaign-style speech at what was billed as the first stop in a thank-you tour in Cincinnati, Ohio, tonight, in which he pledged to unite America while at the same time recounting old grievances against the news media, and his political opponents.

Trump also used the occasion to announce he will nominate retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis as secretary of defense, calling him "the closest thing we have to Gen. George Patton of our time."

President-elect Donald Trump says he has a simple goal in mind when it comes to federal regulations. In a video he released Monday, Trump said he "will formulate a rule that says that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated. So important."

There are some 80,000 pages in the Federal Register, where all regulations are published. So it should be a simple task to pare back some of them. Wrong.

After a week filled with questions and rumors of turmoil behind the scenes of President-elect Donald Trump's transition team, his staff is now publicly laying out a more concrete timetable to get their work of ensuring a smooth handoff up to speed.

The Trump transition team will begin notifying the Obama administration of its designees to meet with current agency officials starting today.

Reince Priebus once joked about his job as chairman of the Republican National Committee that people assumed he must be miserable. But Priebus said he didn't see it that way. "I'm not pouring Bailey's in my cereal," he told CNN.

Now, as newly named chief of staff to President-elect Donald Trump, Priebus has his work cut out for him.

Priebus will have a large say in hiring West Wing staff, and will "be in charge of day to day operations," he told Fox News on Monday morning. He'll also have the president-elect's ear as a top adviser.

President-elect Trump is shaking up the leadership of his transition team, naming Vice President-elect Mike Pence as chairman. Pence will take over the role from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was named as a vice chairman of the team's executive committee.

Pence, Indiana's governor and a former congressman, brings some Washington expertise and has long-standing relationships with congressional leaders such as House Speaker Paul Ryan.

President Obama, saying "we are all rooting for his success," vowed his staff would work as hard as it can to ensure a successful transition of power to president-elect Donald Trump.

Obama spoke in the White House Rose Garden with Vice President Joe Biden at his side. The president had phoned Trump at 3:30 Wednesday morning to congratulate him on his upset victory over democrat Hillary Clinton, and invited Trump to the White House Thursday to discuss transition matters.

Concerns about the possible hacking of voting systems on Election Day are growing. 46 states have asked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to help make sure their systems are protected from disruptions on Tuesday. And some states, like Ohio, are taking steps on their own.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, says his state worked with "all available public and private cyber security experts" to test Ohio's voting systems, including a newly-created cybersecurity unit at the state's National Guard.

The federal government, filled with creaky computer systems that are a poor match for the cybersecurity threats that agencies face from an array of hackers, criminals and foreign governments, is hoping for a multibillion-dollar capital infusion to modernize its IT infrastructure.

"It's the consumers' information. How it is used should be the consumers' choice." So said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler as the commission adopted rules requiring Internet service providers such as Comcast and Verizon to get customers' permission before selling the data they collect to marketers.

In a political season full of "did they really go there?" moments, there was another last night on the Fox News Channel. Host Megyn Kelly, a past target of Donald Trump's tweets, was interviewing former House speaker, now Trump surrogate, Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich expressed his ire over the amount of time the news media have devoted to coverage of the women who have accused Trump of making unwanted sexual advances, compared with coverage of Hillary Clinton's speech leaked to WikiLeaks in which she talks about open borders.

In case you needed more evidence of the toll this divisive campaign is taking on America, a new survey says more than a third of social media users are "worn out" by the amount of political content they encounter.

President Obama's days in office are dwindling, and it's clear he intends to have as much fun as he can on the way out. Last night during a West Coast fundraising trip, he stopped by ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Obama took part in a recurring bit called "Mean Tweets," which consists of reading aloud some of the, you guessed it, mean tweets about him of late.

AT&T's proposed $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner is already raising eyebrows among an important constituency: politicians. Reaction to the deal, which was announced Saturday night, has been swift, and skeptical, from both sides of the aisle.

At a rally in Gettysburg, Pa., earlier Saturday, after news of the deal had started to trickle out, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump said it was "a deal we will not approve in my administration because it's too much concentration of power in the hands of too few."

At Sunday night's presidential debate, Donald Trump unwittingly launched a new meme. In the town hall setting, a Muslim woman asked the candidates about Islamaphobia.

Trump's response: "We have to be sure that Muslims come in and report when they see something going on."

Many have taken up the challenge on Twitter, and #muslimsreportstuff quickly went viral. Responses have ranged from sarcastic, to serious to funny. One of the first and perhaps most widely shared Tweet came from Brooklyn College professor Moustafa Bayoumi:

A riff by Donald Trump at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Monday night about Hillary Clinton's culpability in the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, is raising questions about where exactly Trump got his information and how.

During his speech, Trump held up a piece of paper. "This just came out a little while ago. I have to tell you this," Trump said as he read from the page, which he identified as an email from Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal.

The control tower at a major metropolitan airport can be a pretty chatty place.

Some of the chatter comes from air traffic controllers literally and phonetically spelling out the routes pilots need to follow to their destinations, using the foxtrot-lima-sierra-tango alphabet.

When a weather issue — say, a line of thunderstorms — pops up, routes have to be changed, often while the plane is already on the taxiway. So the controllers spell out new directions to the pilots, the pilots take them down and then carefully read back the instructions to the tower.

For months now, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump have been sparring at each other from afar. On Monday they'll do it face to face, on a stage at Hofstra University on Long Island in New York.

Debates have been a mainstay of presidential campaigns, it seems forever. But that's not quite the case: The first general election debate didn't occur until 1960, in a Chicago TV studio, between Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy.

Monday's debate between Clinton and Trump will take place on the 56th anniversary of that first debate.

The upcoming presidential election will mark a surprising first. Yes, a woman will be on the ballot as a major party nominee. But in addition, for the first time ever, the Organization of American States is sending poll observers to watch as U.S. voting takes place.

The OAS, based in Washington, D.C., has previously observed elections in 26 of its 34 member nations, but never before in the United States. The mission will be led by former Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla.

Former President Bill Clinton will take his wife's place at several campaign events in the next couple of days. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has been recovering from pneumonia at home after abruptly leaving a Sept. 11 commemoration ceremony in New York on Sunday, where her campaign said she became overheated and dehydrated.

Hillary Clinton was due to appear at fundraisers in California on Tuesday and make an appearance for a campaign event near Las Vegas on Wednesday, where her husband will now go instead.

One of the questions raised over the course of this year's presidential race is about how a President Trump would deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

One reason to wonder: the Republican Party platform's new language on policy towards Ukraine.

When Republican Party leaders drafted the platform prior to their convention in Cleveland last month, they had relatively little input from the campaign of then-presumptive nominee Donald Trump on most issues — except when it came to a future Republican administration's stance on Ukraine.

Now that the political conventions are over, its time to start thinking about the transition to the next president.

Yes, really.

As of August 1st, the federal government is making office space available to representatives of the Clinton and Trump campaigns to start making plans for taking over in January. If this seems a bit early, those who have been there say it's not.

Donald Trump is running for president as a Washington outsider. Yet to manage his campaign, he's picked someone who is very much a Washington insider. Paul Manafort has been a political operative and lobbyist for years, including for some controversial figures seeking to influence U.S. politics.